The two “intense” movies that shaped a young Quentin Tarantino: “Blew my fucking mind”
If there was one word to define the works of Quentin Tarantino, then “intense” would come pretty damn close. Throughout Tarantino’s back catalogue, there has always been a striking intensity to the many narratives the iconic director has delivered, regardless of their genre or overall tone.
Whether it be in the crime drama of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the martial arts prowess of Kill Bill, or the sheer wackiness of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino has always doused his movies in unabating intensity, which had led to them being utterly captivating from beginning to end.
In his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino wrote of his favourite movies with a critical eye, and it serves not only as a fascinating insight into the kind of films that have influenced Tarantino’s own but also the works of cinema that helped to sculpt the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs filmmaker in his early days on earth.
At the beginning of the book, Tarantino offers his memories of going to the cinema with his family, particularly in the year 1970, when he saw two intense films that left a deep impression on him. “I saw a lot of intense shit [that year],” Tarantino explained, showing how the year in particular would introduce him to the most visceral kind of cinema.
The first movie that stuck out for Tarantino in 1970 was Elliot Silverstein’s western film A Man Called Horse, based on a short story by Dorothy M. Johnson and starring Richard Harris, Judith Anderson and Jean Gascon. Harris plays an English aristocrat who is captured by the Sioux people, and one scene, in particular, stayed in the memory of Tarantino, who noted, “The eagle-claws-through-the-chest initiation rite in A Man Called Horse blew my fucking mind.”
Before long, Tarantino saw another movie that blew his mind, Dan Curtis’ horror film House of Dark Shadows, based on his television series of the same name. In the film version, a vampire played by Jonathan Field sets about looking for a cure for vampirism in order to marry a woman that bears a striking resemblance to his lost fiancée, with Tarantino stunned by the film’s “blood-squirting slow-motion wooden-stake evisceration.”
After watching the movies in quick succession, Tarantino realised that there was a deep power to the cinematic medium that would inform his adult life. “I remember, during both moments, staring at the screen with my mouth wide open, not quite believing a movie could do that,” Tarantino wrote. “On those nights, I’m sure I was the vocal one on the car ride home (I thought those movies were incredible).”
If Tarantino saw A Man Called Horse and House of Dark Shadows in the year they were released, then he would have been around seven years old, which is an admittedly young age to be watching such films. However, there was always an element of fate with Tarantino that he would go on to become an important cinema figure in his own right, and it all came down to his early love of movies.
As the future director grew up, he threw himself further and further into the cinematic medium, eating everything up from martial arts films to the great western works of yore to the most gruesome efforts in the horror genre, but two of the most important films of his childhood were undoubtedly Silverstein and Curtis’ brilliant works.
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